One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (40 page)

The singer was getting his hair reset at home when the phone on the kitchen wall rang. Bobby Roach took the call, and a New York state trooper told him, “An accident happened up north near Elizabethtown. We think his brother was in an accident. Please let us speak to Mr. Brown.”

Confused, Brown told the troopers, “I don’t have a brother.” The car had gone off the highway and smashed into a bridge abutment, he was told. All three passengers were instantly killed.

Brown called his pilots and told them to get the plane ready, they were flying—Brown, his wife, his father, Roach, and Danny Ray—to New York City to see what the situation was. They drove to Elizabethtown in the afternoon. Roach recalled, “It was a very warm, wonderful town, people were very friendly. They asked for autographs, but we told them we were on very important business and we’d like some privacy right now.”

Strangers directed them to a funeral home. Joe Brown started crying. James was taking nitroglycerine pills for a heart condition at the time; “I told him it might be good for me to view the body for him,”
said Roach. Even with a puffy face and broken neck, he looked like his father.

“Just a crowd of people in an old country church,” said Daviss of the funeral in Toccoa. “Some people say Aretha Franklin was there; I didn’t see Aretha there.”

Brown fell to his knees while going down the aisle at the church, screaming. It was the only time anybody saw him lose his composure that day, and it was brief. Standing with his inner circle at the cemetery, Brown busied himself making business decisions—who was going back to Augusta, who would head to Atlanta, when everybody would see each other again.

“This was a guy whose whole motto in life was ‘Never show weakness,’” said Leeds. “And to him mourning
was
a weakness, wallowing in something out of your control. He didn’t bat much of an eyelash getting back to what he knew how to do. But that’s who he was—a guy who totally could not imagine himself just going back home and sitting and crying. I’m not saying he didn’t do any of that, but he didn’t sit shiva and think about it.”

The day after the funeral, to the shock of those around him, he was back on the road. Contracts had been signed, money had gone out. “James Brown was a hardworking man, and after the funeral he told me he cried, he got over it, and he put it behind him,” said Daviss. “Later, there was times Brown would get melancholy late at night and he’d start talking about it. ‘Yes, my son would have been such and such age now.’

“Brown said the reason he went back to work was, ‘We all got a job. Life goes on. I gotta make a living.’ Like it was his last dollar. But he shut it out—that was his way of dealing with it. He got over it and went on about his business.”

I
n late August, AIP released
Slaughter’s Big Rip-off
. When Brown heard that the studio was going to shoot a sequel to
Black Caesar
,
again directed by Larry Cohen, he said he wanted to do that soundtrack, too.

There were complications. According to Cohen, the studio was irked by the singer’s having sent over a pile of random tapes for his previous two soundtracks, music that was not composed to the length of the scenes. After directors twice were stuck editing the music to fit, said Cohen, AIP had vowed they would never do it again. Cohen said he heard from Bobbit that Brown wanted to record, and he had to relay to Bobbit that the studio considered him “persona non grata.” Bobbit didn’t give up, saying, “The man accepts a challenge.” So Cohen agreed to take a soundtrack on spec. When the music came in, Cohen played it for producers who told him, “It’s the same old James Brown stuff.” They hired Motown composers and singer Edwin Starr to compose for the sequel,
Hell Up in Harlem
.

A widely repeated story is that Cohen rejected Brown’s score by telling Wesley, “It’s not funky enough, babe.” The director denies it.

“First of all I wouldn’t have known what that meant,” said Cohen. “For me to tell James Brown what his music was about, that was just not me. But to the people at AIP, it was ‘the same old James Brown stuff,’ that’s how they put it. I told them they were never going to get any better from anybody else, and they didn’t.”

The song that was intended to set the tone early in the picture, “The Payback,” was recorded August 1973. According to Jabo Starks, who worked on it with Fred Wesley, “We sat and watched the movie, wrote it out. Fred had the words.” They recorded an instrumental track, and then Brown came into the Augusta studio and listened. “James completely changed everything. We got caught in the middle of an ocean without a paddle. It was do or die—James had to make the record
then
. All we had was the rhythm. I just tried to hold it and make it
solid
.”

“It’s never a tune until James Brown come in and do it. I mean it sounded all right,” said Wesley, “but then James came in sweatin’ and humpin’ and screamin’
and it fired everybody up. Only when he came into the studio did it instantly become a hit.”

Brown arrived in a terrible mood, and as he sang words he had written, he kept shouting
damn
over and over. That was a problem, and the engineer spent hours carefully cutting them all out of the tape.

If the song didn’t make it onto the movie soundtrack, the fact remains: “The Payback”
is
a blaxploitation movie that makes its own soundtrack. “Revenge! I’m mad,” Brown shrieks over a guitar scratching like a razor on a rock. “I can do wheeling, I can do dealing, I just don’t do no squealing,” he shouts, several decades before
Stop Snitchin’
. A chorus of curb girls sass and second him throughout, while Martha High’s triple-tracked keening moan keys the moment when all the pigeons abruptly fly off and the action jumps.

Brown’s words and delivery are so focused, so obsessive, that folks ever since have wondered exactly what wrong he was fixing to pay back. Some suggest it was the arson of the Third World. Couldn’t be; though the song came out after it, “Payback” was recorded before the fire.

Byrd thought he was paying back the white man, and counseled Brown to choose his words carefully: “
We
know what you’re talking about, trying to pay people back—I understand that, but some things you just can’t straight out say.” Wesley believed Brown had found out a woman who worked for him was dating with Harold Melvin, and he wanted revenge on that.

In the end, it’s pointless trying to figure out what inspired “Payback.” He’s
mad
, deal with it, and the song is a funny, wicked, 360-degree sweep of the streets circa 1973 that sums up an era. Hail Caesar: he may not know karate, but he knows ka-
razor
.

Chapter Twenty

EMULSIFIED

F
rom the street, the house in Augusta looked like just another fortress for people who had made it, either recently or in the ancestral past. Beyond the front door, though, life was more freewheeling than elsewhere in the neighborhood. Musicians and associates from New York or Atlanta came and went. So did James and Deidre’s children—daughters Deanna (born in 1969) and Yamma (born in 1972)—and also coming, going, and frequently staying were the boys from Toccoa, Larry (born in 1958) and Terry (1955). Then there were other children, like Darryl (born in 1960), whose mother was Bea Ford, a singer with Brown and Joe Tex early in the 1960s, and Venisha (1965), whose mother was singer Yvonne Fair. There was a bit of the feeling of the house he had grown up in, full of family and strangers.

At the same time, there was an established order, an awareness that power pointed straight to the chief. The foundation of family life wasn’t a delineation of right and wrong. No, the true foundation was an oft-repeated credo, one the kids commemorated on a plaque hanging in the kitchen.

“THE GOLDEN RULE,” it declared, “Is as follows:

According to Deanna, Deidre was a homemaker who was hands-on with the kids. “And when he was home, he was hands-on, too. He was a very strict father, very strict. Very strict.”

A few doors down lived Carl Sanders, former governor of Georgia. The community was wealthy, it was white, and it could not have been easy for the Browns to make Walton Way their home. Brown never spoke of any hostility. But perhaps he got a measure of revenge at Christmas, when he put up lavish lights and decorations on the front lawn, a large Santa Claus and wise men tableau—all of them, including Santa, black. Folks from all over Augusta—poor folks, black folks—drove up the Hill to view this display of exuberance in an otherwise reserved enclave of antebellum heaps, where anything beyond a Georgia football pennant was beyond the pale.

Nouveau riche African Americans in an antebellum paradise, the Masters Tournament down the road. A dad who ruled firmly, but infrequently. It wasn’t simple, but it wasn’t boring.

One morning Brown was lounging in his robe, feeding bits to the family poodle, Poojie, at the dining-room table. There was a swinging door to the kitchen, and on this morning the maid opened it briskly, cracking the animal’s head. “You done killed Poojie!” Brown exclaimed. That was not quite true: It took a week for Poojie to expire.

Brown loved that dog, and laid the poor thing to rest in a lavish white casket with hand-painted nails. Then he staged a full-scale funeral at the house. The family was all there, and aides and
employees of his radio station, everybody careful to dress appropriately for a state ceremony. Danny Ray was there, and when Brown broke down, inconsolable before the dog lying in his sarcophagus in the kitchen, it was Ray who tenderly placed a hand on Brown’s shoulder, whispering in his ear, finally dropping a cloak over Brown’s back.

He did not know what to do with his kids. “Common sense dictates this was a guy who grew up without anything like intimacy around him,” said Leeds. “Affection was a commodity, something the soldiers bought. He knew what was expected of him, and knew to hammer on the fatherly points—‘stay in school,’ ‘do your homework.’ But it was a role to him.”

He enjoyed taking the family on long drives to the South Carolina countryside where he was born, but they were not so interested in that. Then, in the summer of 1973, he met a young man who was burning with obvious talent. The teenager was not just skilled in motivating strangers, but hungry for it. The teenager worshipped Brown, and did whatever he was told. He
liked
driving to South Carolina with him, or at least he didn’t complain.

The young man was Alfred Sharpton, a New York friend of Teddy’s, and after Teddy was buried, mutual friends brought him to the Newark Symphony Hall for a backstage meeting with Teddy’s father. Brown stared at the chubby eighteen-year-old street preacher a long moment, then said, “Are you the reverend?”

“Yessir.”

“If you listen to me, I’ll make you the biggest one out there.”

Flummoxed, Sharpton stammered out a “Nossir,” explaining he wasn’t interested in music, he was in civil rights.

“That’s what I mean—you listen to me and go whole hog and you’ll be the biggest.”

Sharpton’s father had run out on the family when the boy was nine, and Alfred was hungry for the interest the singer displayed. They appeared on
Soul Train
together, Sharpton presenting his mentor with an award from his organization, the National Youth
Movement, praising “The Payback” as “the theme song of young black America in 1974.”

The teenager began promoting Brown’s concerts around New York, and then went with him on the road. Brown was sculpting him, teaching Sharpton to be an outspoken, never-back-down rabble-rouser in his own image. “Just like he said, ‘I’m going to make Maceo my star saxophone player,’ and ‘Fred will be my featured trombone,’ I was meant to be his civil rights leader,” said Sharpton.

Brown convinced him to shorten the name to Al—too many syllables in Alfred—and he made his protégé promise that he would style his hair in his fashion, and keep it so for as long as the singer was alive. “I’m telling you, he handled me like I was his act,” Sharpton said.

In Vegas on an assignment, Sharpton once ran into Reverend Jesse Jackson, a rabble-rouser from an earlier time. Sharpton brought Jackson back to the hotel with him to see Brown, and the singer was fully holding court, taking the conversation where
he
wanted it to go. Finally, Brown turned to Jackson and said, “Jesse, you’re a Motown act. You’re a Motown act—you are black, but you are accepted.” He thrust a finger at Sharpton. “He’s a James Brown act. He’s raw and authentic, and he’s going to outrun you in the end.”

They would talk—of many things, but only of certain things, because Brown was careful to keep the strands of his life separate. Still, by the terms of Brown’s life they were “close,” and it did not escape the singer how voracious the youth was in absorbing les-sons from his adopted dad.

The two drove out of Augusta one day, across the Savannah River toward Bamberg, to see Brown’s aunt Jettie. “Pull over,” Brown suddenly rasped. Between the beveled sunlight and swamp oaks, their car off the blacktop, there was something he wanted the young man to understand. “I was born out here,” the singer said, and then he talked about how his dad used to leave him at home all
day while he was out tapping the trees for turpentine. “Look out for my boy,” Joe Brown would tell a neighbor, but no one did, not really.

“I been hurt all my life,” Brown said, opening up. “I learned how to turn the pain around and get energy, and I learned
how
to be alone.”

There was one thing he wanted to make sure that Sharpton heard him on, out in the quiet Georgialina sunset. “Whatever you do, do not follow the crowd. You got to stand alone and have your own style, your own way of doing things.” That was the lesson he all but pounded into Sharpton over and again through the years.

S
urrounding Brown in the 1970s was his family, and the friends he took an interest in, like Sharpton. There was his band, which he labored to keep in line and apart from himself.